Redshift is the world’s first fully GPU-accelerated, biased renderer.
Redshift is a powerful GPU-accelerated renderer, built to meet the specific demands of contemporary high-end production rendering. Tailored to support creative individuals and studios of every size, Redshift offers a suite of powerful features and integrates with industry standard CG applications.
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All Features

Core
Redshift has the features and uncompromising quality of a CPU renderer, but at GPU rendering speeds. Unlike other GPU renderers out there, Redshift is a biased renderer that allows the user to adjust the quality of individual techniques in order to get the best performance/quality balance for their production.

Out of core geometry and textures
Redshift’s efficient memory management allows rendering of scenes containing hundreds of millions of polygons and TBs of texture data.

Global Illumination
Achieve blazingly fast indirect lighting using biased point-based GI techniques, as well as brute-force GI.

World-leading performance
Harnessing the raw power of the GPU and using intelligent sampling techniques makes Redshift the worlds faster renderer.

Proxies
The user can export groups of objects and lights to Redshift Proxy files which can be easily referenced by other scenes. Proxies allow for powerful shader, matte and visibility flag overrides as often required in production.

Transformation and deformation blur

Volumetric rendering

Hair rendering with ‘Min Pixel Width’
Thin hair can produce noisy renders. Redshift supports ‘MPW’ rendering which smooths out the look of thin and hard-to-sample hairs.

Tessellation and displacement

Baking

Command-line rendering

SDK

Shading and texturing
Redshift supports complex, advanced shading networks and texturing capabilities as required for production-quality rendering.

Physically Based Materials
Flexible, production-ready shader, compatible with PBR workflows of Allegorithmic Substance and Unreal Engine.

Ray switches
Control how materials behave for certain ray types. Useful for customizing GI or double-sided polygon shading.

Hair shader
Multi-lobe anisotropic specular using the physically-based Marschener BRDF.

Dedicated skin shaders
Support for up to 3 layers of sub-surface scattering in a single shader for realistic looking skin.

Round corners
Get smooth edges without requiring geometry tessellation. This technology is licensed from NVidia.

Displacement mapping with ‘auto-bump’
Add geometric and lighting detail to surfaces using displacement mapped height, vector textures or procedural shading nodes.

No texturing limitations
Virtually unlimited number and size of textures regardless of VRAM. Built-in efficient UDIM/UVTile tiling support.

Powerful shading attributes
Shaders can access per-vertex (weight maps, multiple UVs, etc) or per-object attributes for maximum flexibility.

Sprite node
Render foliage and other opacity-cutout effects blazingly fast!

Large variety of nodes
Redshift supports many dcc shading nodes for math, color ramps, color remaps and conversion, gamma and many others.

Lighting
Choose from a wide variety of light types. All lights are multiple importance sampled for the cleanest results using the fewest samples. Redshift also supports per-object light/shadow linking for great artistic control.

Dome lights
Efficiently light an entire scene using image-based environment textures.

Mesh lights
Use any mesh in the scene as a light source, with the same features and sampling efficiency as regular area lights.

Volumetric lighting
Redshift lights can affect atmospheric volumetric fogging for the popular ‘God ray’ effect.

Physical sun and sky
Natural-looking physical sun light and sky emulation.

Physically correct lights
Full flexibility ranging from area lights to photometric/IES lights, ‘portal’ lights and texture-projected ‘gobos’.

Cameras
Redshift supports all commonly used camera types, as well advanced controls for physical camera effects.

Multiple camera lens types
Fisheye, spherical, cylindrical cameras, lens distortion.

VR
Stereo Spherical rendering for VR applications.

Physical lens effects
Familiar photographic exposure controls such as ISO, shutter, vignette, color balance and textured bokeh depth-of-field.

AOVs
Redshift supports a comprehensive set of AOVs for the most demanding post-production compositing needs.

Deep and Layered EXR support
For 3d compositing and efficient management of AOVs.

Many AOV Types
Material shading components (albedo, diffuse, reflections etc), depth, motion vectors, puzzle-matte and many more.
Houdini

Hair and Fur
Support of the Houdini curve primitives, that are extracted as efficient Redshift hair objects.

Houdini primitives
Automatic and configurable tessellation of the Houdini primitive surfaces (primitives, nurbs, etc.).

Volumes
Direct rendering of OpenVDB files and the Houdini Volume and VDB primitives. Support of volume instancing and velocity grids.

Strands
Render of any kind of Houdini primitive as Redshift strands.

Instancing/particles
Support of the Houdini instancing, including the Instance OBJ node, and the “instance” and “instancepath” attributes, extracted as mesh instances or particle point clouds.

Non-GUI Tools
The plugin is compatible with all the Houdini non-GUI tools (hython, hscript, etc.) and includes a set of custom HScript commands to control the renderer.
3ds Max

Forest Pack
Support for the world’s most popular scattering plug-in.

Ornatrix Max
Support for the super popular hair, fur and feathers plug-in for 3ds Max.

Hair Farm
Support for the precise and powerful hair modeling 3ds Max plug-in.
Maya

Instancer
Support for Autodesk’s extension for node managing instances of scene objects created by a MASH network.

XGen
Support for Autodesk’s own geometry instancer for Maya.

Ornatrix Maya
Support for the super popular hair, fur and feathers plug-in for Maya.

PL Yeti
Support for the popular fur, hair and feathers tool-set for Maya.

Joe Alter
Support for Shave and a Haircut the veteran Maya hair and fur plugin.

Golaem
Support for the popular crowd simulation software for Maya.
Softimage

ICE
Support for ICE interoperability for Maya to send ICE effects data between Maya and Softimage.
Cinema4D

Mograph Cloner
Extensive support for Cinema 4D’s geometry objects including Instances, Generators, Deformers, Cloners and MoGraph objects.

Particle Instancing
Support for powerful built-in particle instancing and per-particle attributes.
System Requirements
Operating Systems
- Microsoft Windows: 64-bit Windows 7 / 8 / 10
- Linux: 64-bit distribution with glibc 2.12 or higher
- MacOS: El Capitan (10.11) or higher
3D Applications Supported
- Autodesk Maya (Windows, Linux and macOS): 64-bit edition. 2014 or later
- Autodesk Softimage (Windows): 64-bit edition. 2011 or later
- Autodesk 3dsMax: 64-bit edition. 2013 or later
- Maxon Cinema4D (Windows and macOS): 64-bit edition. R16 or later
- SideFX Houdini (Windows, Linux and macOS): 64-bit edition. 14.0 or later
- The Foundry Katana (Windows, Linux): 64-bit edition. 2.5v4 or later
Minimum
- 8GB of system memory
- Processor with SSE2 support (Pentium4 or better)
- NVidia GPU with CUDA compute capability 2.0 or higher and 2GB VRAM
- Single GPU
Recommended
- 16GB of system memory or more
- Core i7 or Xeon equivalent, 3.0GHz or higher
- NVidia GPU with CUDA compute capability 5.0 or higher and 8GB of VRAM or more
- Multiple GPUs
Please see here to determine if your GPU supports compute capability 2.0






What our customers are saying
“We tested various new renderers and quickly realized that Redshift was fast, achieved the look we wanted and, most importantly, was production ready, especially since it was available for all of these DCCs – that was a big win!”
– Shimon Cohen, Blizzard Entertainment
“With the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio, and with the support of Redshift, we’re able to continue in the original spirit of Jim Henson, continually finding new ways to explore, grow, and innovate.”
– Steffen Wild, Jim Henson Creature Shop
“Redshift allowed us to maintain a consistent level of quality throughout all shots, while still achieving much faster render times than the year prior. Redshift truly helped keep this project on track, with a higher overall quality.”
– Francois Beaudry, Digital Dimension